When discussing the history of Jazz, an important type of music is developed that changed the music industry. This music, bebop, helped to influence other types of music, and it also let us appreciate jazz more As is so often the case in jazz, when a style or way of playing becomes too commercialized, the evolution turned in the opposite direction. A group of musicians, who had something new to say, something definitely new, found each other reacting against the general Swing fashion. This new music developed, at first in spurts, originally in Kansas City and then most of all in musician's hangouts in Harlem, particularly at Minton's Playhouse, and once again at the beginning of a decade. Contrary to what has been claimed, this new music did not develop when a group of musicians banded together to create something new, because the old could no longer work. The old style worked very well. It also is not true that the new jazz style was developed as an effort on behalf of an interconnected group of musicians. The new style formed in the minds and on the instruments of very different musicians in many different places, independent of each other. But Min

ton's became a focal point, just as New Orleans had been forty years earlier. And just as Jelly Roll Morton's claim to have "invented" jazz then is crazy, so would be the claim of any musician to have "invented" modern jazz. This new style called bebop was like, onomatopoetically, the then best-loved interval of the music: the flatted fifth. The words "bebop" or "rebop" came into being, when someone attempted to "sing" these melodic leaps. Bebop, which was also called bop, was the fist kind of modern jazz, which split jazz into two opposing camps in the last half of the 1940's. The most important musicians who gathered at Minton's where Thelonious Monk, piano, Kenny Clarke, drums, Charlie Christian, guitar, Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet, and the altoist Charlie Parker. This was later to become the real genius of modern jazz, as Louis Armstrong is the genius of traditional jazz. One of these musicians, Charlie Christian, is not only a founder of modern jazz but also one of those who created from Swing the basis for the making of modern jazz. There is a whole group of such "pioneers": together the last generation of Swing and pathbreakers for bop. Among the trumpets, it is Roy Eldridge: among the pianists, Clyde Hart; among the tenors, Lester Young; among the bassists, Jimmy Blanton; among the drummers, Jo Jones and Dave Tough; among the guitarists, Charlie Christian. Bebop was an instrumental music. No singer could have made it. Charlie Parker forever changed the fundamental relationship between voices and instruments as it had existed up to that point. Horn players still had to breathe, and so they had to base their phrased on the length of the human breath, but no longer did they need to limit what they played to the boundaries of the voice. They played faster, way beyond what any human voice could make out with clarity, and they played melodies that never were meant to be sung. Bop never came as naturally to the voice as it did to Parker's alto saxophone and Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet and then to the other instruments. The new music may have reassigned many of jazz's basic principles, especially the primacy of the blues, but it was almost only a player's music. Most bop musicians had an unusual technique. They played long, dazzling phrases with many notes, difficult intervals, unexpected breaks, and unusual turns in melodic direction. On slower tunes, they had a good ear for small changes of harmony. Only really skilled musicians were able to play bebop well, and only sophisticated listeners at first appreciated it. In bebop performances, musicians usually played an complex melody, followed with long periods of solo improvisation, and restated the theme at the end. The bassist supplied the basic beat for the group by plucking a steady, moving bass line. The drummer perfected the beat with sticks or brushes on cymbals, snare drum, and tom-tom. The

Some topics in this essay:
Dizzy Gillespie's, Thelonious Monk, Sextet York, Chasin Bird, Bebop Bebop, Charlie Parker, Roll Morton's, Federation Musicians, Developments Bebop, Minton's Playhouse, jazz musicians, bebop musicians, modern jazz, charlie parker, dizzy gillespie, history jazz, jazz style, charlie christian, flatted fifth, period history jazz, orleans jazz, musicians jazz musicians,